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This is the large format camera collection of the School of Visual Arts in NYC, one of the leading art schools in the United States. Beautiful.

This photograph was taken by a lens with some "obstruction" on the front element. Aside from the blurry patch of nastiness in the bottom portion of the frame, the rest of the image looks pretty decent. What do you think the "obstruction" is? A little dirt? A smudge where the photographer accidentally touched the front element? A scratch? The answer is a little closer to a scratch than a smudge...

I'm not sure how useful this would be for most people, but it's a neat look at the kinds of technologies people are working on to enrich our photo sharing experience. Pass-Them-Around is an app developed by researchers at Nokia that lets you share digital photographs with friends sitting around a table as if you had physical prints sitting in front of you. The phones can also be placed side by side to act as larger displays for the photos.

Shopobot is a new shopping tool that helps buyers determine the best price to buy products from various retailers by tracking their price changes across time. Retailers often change the prices of different items often to determine the best price point, which can cause frustration for people who buy a product only to find it $50 cheaper the next day. If you're looking to buy a camera, lens, or any other piece of gear, you might benefit from doing a quick search on Shopobot to find the price …

During a workshop in São Paulo, Brazil earlier this month, someone asked Magnum street photographer Bruce Gilden to explain why he shoots with a Leica. Here's his response.

Last week we shared the beautiful first space photo to be taken with the OmegaCAM, a 268-megapixel, 1,700-lb camera operated by the European Southern Observatory. Here are some photographs of the camera itself, which uses an array of 32 separate CCD sensors for its incredible resolution.

DSLR Solutions has a new follow focus kit that allows you to keep track of focus points without being bulky or expensive. The $60 kit is basically a clamp, a velcro strap, and some metal markers that attach to the strap. Attaching the markers allows you to bounce between focus points, or keep track of a number of points if you have multiple subjects. We've featured a number of DIY follow focus solutions here in the past, but using a velcro strap and markers is something we haven't seen before.

One of the benefits of running a gear rental business is that you have a ton of equipment you can use for random experiments. That's exactly what Roger Cicala, the owner of LensRentals, did with the UV filters he had on hand. One-upping the 19 filter stack we shared a while back, he mounted 50 different UV filters to a Canon 5D Mark II and 300 f/4 lens to see what the resulting images would look like.

Last week we shared about how astronauts left some Nikon DSLR gear to burn up in the atmosphere instead of having it brought back to Earth, but it certainly wasn't the first time cameras were left in space. Did you know that there are 12 Hasselblad cameras currently sitting on the surface of the moon? The cameras that shot those iconic images of the moon's surface between 1969 and 1972 were left there to allow for the 25kg of lunar rock samples that were brought back instead. Only the film …

German sports photographer Peter Langenhahn has an interesting way of documenting the important moments in a sporting event. Instead of showing them each in a separate photograph, he shoots events from a distant perspective and combines the important moments into a single image afterward. For example, one of his panoramas shows every single foul called throughout the course of a soccer match. After shooting up to 3,000 photos during an event, he spends up to 2-3 months combining them into a …

Kate Spade's Pocomo Gwem handbag features a pretty well-known rangefinder camera. Recognize it? It's the Leica M9 with a gold plated spade in the "red dot" instead of the standard Leica logo. Too bad the $225 bag isn't meant to actually hold one.

Flickr is a popular method of sharing photos, but the service doesn't provide any easy way to download them in bulk. Flick and Share is a web app that creates simple download links for Flickr sets that you can send to family and friends, allowing them to quickly download a copy of the images you shot at an event. We've tested it out, and it works as advertised.

Film director André Chocron created this beautiful music video for the song "Time is of the essence" by Cold Mailman using time-lapse and tons of time-consuming editing. The time-lapse stills were shot over two weeks using a Canon 7D and Nikon D300, but that wasn't the difficult part -- editing the video to have the apartment buildings serve as equalizers for the music took a whopping three months!

Mobile photo sharing star Instagram just announced its 5 millionth member and will soon pass 100 million photos, but their domination of the market may not last much longer. According to TechCrunch, Facebook -- a service that receives 6 billion photos a month and stores 100 billion photos total -- is currently working on a feature-packed iPhone app that may soon be ubiquitous on iPhones.

Meet Ianto, a light painting Miniature Pinscher. Her owner Michael Zoellner created a special vest with 5 LED lights that functions as a Persistence of Vision display, spelling out the words of the novel "Makers" by Cory Doctorow in the air as Ianto sprints across the park. If you don't have the technical know-how to pull this off, you can always try strapping an iPad to your dog!

German wedding photographer Rocco built this ingenious do-it-yourself photo booth using a Nikon, an iPad, and a remote shutter release. Guests can step on a pedal to trigger the shutter, which snaps a well-lit photograph (there's a Speedlight on each side) and beams the image to the iPad via an Eye-Fi card and the app ShutterSnitch. While this photo booth doesn't print out photo strips, it could be a great and fun way to give an event's attendees some extra high-res photos without any extra …

Move aside Panasonic GF3, this is the world's smallest Micro Four Thirds camera. Olympus took its Despicable Me-style shrink ray and reduced the Olympus E-PL1, E-P2, and E-PL2 to the size of an SD card for a promotion over in Hong Kong. They're meant to be used as cute little cell phone charms, but they work nicely as tiny prop cameras for your action figures as well!

One of the exciting features of iOS 5 announced by Apple last week is the ability to use the iPhone's "volume up" button as a shutter button when taking pictures. What's also neat is that this design choice also means that the "volume up" button on Apple's headphone remotes can also trigger the shutter, allowing them to be used as remote shutter releases. Say hello to stealthy and/or non-blurry iPhone photographs!

Bad news for TinEye but good news for photographers: Google is adding reverse image search to their ever-growing list of products, allowing photographers to search using their photos to see the different places they're being used online. You can search for images by entering a URL, uploading from your computer, dragging and dropping onto the search page, or via Chrome and Firefox extensions. The feature will be rolling out to Google's users over the next few days -- once you see the camera icon …

Sometimes Photoshop's amazing Content-Aware Fill gets it almost right, yet so very wrong.

Just because you use the built-in flash on your compact camera doesn't mean you need to live with harsh, direct lighting. Here's a quick video tutorial teaching how to use any small white card (e.g. a piece of scrap paper or a business card) to easily bounce your flash and soften the lightning.

Medical experiments can be quite bizarre -- I once heard about one that involved injecting subjects with various kinds of animal feces. After a year of participating in various clinical trials for cash, photographer and recent art-school graduate Josh Dickinson decided to start a project called Studied to document what it's like to be a human guinea pig. His experiences range from being pricked with needles and subjected to pain to being suffocated...

Here's a helpful tutorial that teaches how to shoot in harsh, midday sunlight using a single reflector to soften the shadows on your subject. If you've never used a reflector outdoors before, it's a great primer for getting started. Aside from buying a nice reflector for about $30, you can also find cheap ones for under $10 on eBay, use a car sun shade, or make one yourself with cardboard and foil.

For her series titled Face to Face, photographer Ann Hamilton placed a pinhole camera in her mouth and shot photographs by simply opening her mouth at people. Upon first glance, the view almost looks like you're looking out someone's eye.

What if you could take perfect group photographs by first shooting multiple frames and then selecting the best portions of each one? Microsoft amazed us with this concept last year with its Photo Fuse technology, and now we may soon be seeing something similar coming to mobile phone cameras (and hopefully compact cameras as well). Imaging technology company Scalado gave the above demonstration at a conference earlier this month showing off Rewind, a super-useful feature that shoots a burst of …

One sad truth about the photo industry is that there's a ton of counterfeit products floating around, and unless you buy directly from a reputable source, it can be difficult to know for sure whether you're getting the real thing. Last month we posted on how up to 1/3 of memory cards labeled "SanDisk" are actually counterfeit. Over on Nikon's website, there's a support page that shows photographs of counterfeit Nikon accessories next to genuine ones, with many of them almost indistinguishable …

San Francisco-based photographer Ian Tuttle came up with this funky way of adding silhouettes to his Diana F+ photos without Photoshop -- using some Elmer's glue, he attached a couple 1/8” figurines (the kind meant for model railroads) inside the camera upside down. The resulting photographs show a couple shadowy tourists looking at each scene!

Hacker Rob Flickenger wasn't satisfied with ordinary photographs of his ongoing Tesla coil experiments, so he decided to shoot Matrix-style "bullet time" images to capture "3D lightning". He purchased 10 Canon A470 cameras and configured them to function as a single 70-megapixel 10-angle camera.

After having images of it leaked onto the Interwebs last week, Panasonic's DMC GF3 Micro Four Thirds camera is now official. Like its predecessor, the GF2, the GF3 packs a 12-megapixel sensor, has a 3-inch LCD touchscreen, and shoots 1080p 1080/60i AVCHD video. In terms of differences, it has a faster processor that allows for faster autofocus times weighs 15% less, is 17% smaller, and is also even more simple than the GF2 -- it lacks a hot shoe and has a pop-up flash there instead.

Turns out turning photographs into stencils isn't transformative enough to be defended as "fair use". In a case that has many similarities to the Shepard Fairey vs. AP legal battle, a judge ruled earlier this week against graffiti artist Thierry Guetta after Guetta (AKA Mr. Brainwash) had used a "stencil-ized" photo of Run DMC by Glen E. Friedman to promote an exhibition, concluding that Guetta's piece didn't differ enough from the original image to be considered fair use.

Amateur astronomy enthusiasts may be content with shooting the stars with a DSLR through a telescope, but what would a consortium of astronomy institutes use for photographing the night sky? The answer is the OmegaCam, a giant 1,700-lb camera found at the heart of the largest telescope designed for visible light surveying: the VST. It uses 32 separate CCD sensors that work together to form a giant 268-megapixel sensor, capturing 30 terabytes worth of photographs every year. The photograph seen …

Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed a new law last week that makes it a crime to post images to the Internet that "frighten, intimidate, or cause emotional distress." Violators found guilty of doing so now face up to one year in jail and $2,500 in fines.

It's not every where you get to watch and hear someone picking the brain of a National Geographic photographer. The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library recorded this video interview with photographer Jim Richardson and asked him to share about his experiences and words of advice. Richardson also has an interesting FAQ page on his website that answers a lot of questions about shooting for the famous yellow-bordered magazine.

The USPS has unveiled a new set of stamps called "Pioneers of American Industrial Design" that honors 12 of the most influential American industrial designers of the 20th century, and one of them is Walter Dorwin Teague.

Observant Micro-Four Thirds fans recently spotted a strange looking camera in a promo video on YouTube (which was quickly taken down). The camera is most likely Panasonic's new Lumix GF3, a camera that's expected to be officially unveiled on June 13th. Its rumored to pack the same 16 megapixel sensor as the G3, not have a hot shoe, and to have a touchscreen-based interface. The company also seems to be taking the "large sensor in a small body" thing quite seriously -- this camera is tiny!

Here's an educational video that provides a helpful visual demonstration of what a polarizing filter can do for your photographs.

For part of his MA in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Brendan Corrigan visited car boot sales -- a kind of market where people sell things out of their trunks -- and purchased old cameras for about the price of a roll of film. He then had the used film inside each camera developed, publishing the photos online alongside the cameras they were found in (along with the price he paid for the camera). His project is called "Make me an offer".

NASA captured this incredible photograph of the tornado that tracked across Massachusetts last week, showing the storm's destructiveness as seen from space. The Westfield-Charlton tornado remained on the ground for an hour and ten minutes, carving a 39-mile-long path of destruction into the ground that was half a mile wide at some points.

Photographer Josh Owens spent a little over a month staying at various hotels in Manhattan and shooting stills a Canon 5D Mark II and two 7Ds. He ended up with over an hour's worth of time-lapse footage, which he whittled down into this stunning 4-minute video showing Manhattan in motion.

Textify.it is a neat little web and iPhone app that recreates photographs using colored text. Simply drag and drop a photograph from your computer onto the page to get started. The image above is a photograph of Crater Lake that we turned into text using the letters from "PetaPixel".

Needed a Polaroid picture for a project I'm working on, so I purchased a Polaroid One Step camera for $15 off a guy on Craigslist and a pack of Polaroid 600 film that expired back in 2003 for $26 with shipping from eBay. I was a bit concerned that the film wouldn't work anymore, but found that the battery in the film pack still had some juice and that the film still developed, though the upper corners of the image are messed up.

If you're like me, you have a bazillion photographs backed up on external hard drives, but have you ever wondered how digital photographs are stored on the magnetic surface of a platter spinning at thousands of rotations per minute? This interesting video provides a neat look at how hard drives work, though it will probably also convince you to back up your photographs by some other means as well (e.g. online or on discs). The engineering that makes hard drives possible is amazing!

Need some inspiration? The "Endless Interestingness" page by designers Mark Barcinski and Adrien Jeanjean -- they have an awesome website, BTW -- shows thumbnails of interesting Flickr photographs, and extends endlessly in every direction. If you see a photo you like, simply click it to open up the original Flickr page.

Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli recently captured some amazing one-of-a-kind photographs of the Space Shuttle Endeavour docked with the International Space Station from about 600 feet away using a Nikon D3x and 24-120mm lens.

Apple is looking to make an even bigger splash in the camera market with the photography-related features they've included in the upcoming iOS 5, with one of the huge ones being cloud connectivity. iPhones running iOS 5 will be connected to iCloud, Apple's online backup solution, and every photograph captured will be automatically and wirelessly copied to the cloud and into the user's "Photo Stream". The photos can then be accessed from other computers and devices, and are deleted after 30 days …

About a week ago, a Dutch woman uploaded a video to YouTube that appeared to show her getting a sleeve tattoo showing the Facebook profile photographs of 152 of her friends. The video spread like wildfire, and news outlets ranging from CNN to Forbes published the story. Now, she's admitting that it was actually a publicity stunt intended to get the tattoo shop some free publicity, and that the tattoo was actually a temporary one that washes off in a couple days.

Here's a crash course on getting started with using Photoshop Layers and Masks by Sean Armenta of Fstoppers. If you've been making edits on your photographs directly without creating new layers, watch this video to have your eyes opened to the power of layers.

An unfortunate photo-lover in Hong Kong recently got into a fight with his girlfriend, who proceeded to smash his beautiful collection of Nikon lenses. Among the casualties were a Nikkor 28-70 f2.8D, Tokina 28-70 F2.6-2.8, Nikkor 80-200 f2.8D, Nikkor 17-35 F2.8D, and a Nikon TC-20E teleconverter.

Need a break from work? Photographer Murray Fredericks created this beautiful 10-minute time-lapse video of clouds forming and dissipating over a body of water. Best when viewed in full screen and in HD.

After photographs of the cameras were leaked back in April 2011, Sony has now officially announced its A35 translucent mirror camera to replace the A33 and the NEX-C3. The A35 has the same resolution as the A55 -- 16.2 megapixels -- and can shoot 1080/60 video and 7 frames per second for stills (though resolution is reduced to 8.4MP at this rate. ISO goes up to 25600, and there's a large 3-inch touchscreen on the back. The A35 will be available in August for $600, or $700 if you want the …